Grief is an Organ Transplant: Why You Never Truly "Recover"

You don’t heal from a death. You grieve it.

Recently, I was watching an episode of The Decameron where a character who had just lost his wife is being comforted by a friend. The friend tries to explain that his loss doesn't make him unique and tells him, "It’s awful and you will never recover". The grieving husband just squints his eyes, chuckles, and replies, "This is awful and I will never recover".

When I heard that, my eyes filled with tears because that is the absolute truth—that is grief. You don’t stop missing the person, they don’t stop being dead, and you don’t recover.

Losing someone is like losing an organ. Your liver, kidney, or heart becomes damaged beyond repair, and suddenly it’s gone. The big day comes, your organ is removed, and the doctors come in and replace the loss with something new. You keep living and make adjustments, but your body, changed by the loss, will never be exactly the same again. You move forward in the world without that original part of yourself, and while the transplant keeps you going, you will never have the old one again.

This metaphor sums up so much of what I’ve been trying to put into words since losing my Papa. He was a core part of me. When he died, it cracked me wide open and completely changed who I am and how I perceive the world. That core part of me became damaged beyond repair, and now I have to go forward in life living in  a different world—a world without him in it. I don’t know that I "healed" from anything; instead, this life-altering thing happened, and I had to grow and find my new normal.

When you get a transplant, you have to get on anti-rejection meds to make sure it sticks. In grief, we have to take our own version of anti-rejection meds. It still feels like a piece of me is gone, but as time goes on, the evidence of that love shifts. Instead of his physical voice, his presence, and his time, the loss is replaced with memories, sadness, gratitude for what we had, his legacy, and an entirely new kind of love.

You still feel the sadness because you don’t stop missing them. But you take your meds, you adjust to the transplant, and you keep going forward.